politics, theory, action

Posts categorized "women"

March 25, 2017

All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the “masters”. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are identical in this respect. It is only the form of exploitation that changes; the exploitation itself remains. An exhibition of the work of “women exploited at home” has opened in Paris, the “capital of the world”, and the centre of civilisation. Each exhibit has a little tag showing how much the woman working at home receives for making it, and how much she can make per day and per hour on this basis. And what do we find? Not on a single article can a woman working at home earn more than 1.25 francs, i.e., 50 kopeks, whereas the earnings on the vast majority of jobs are very much smaller. Take lampshades. The pay is 4 kopeks per dozen. Or paper bags: 15 kopeks per thousand, with earnings at six kopeks an hour. Here are little toys with ribbons, etc.: 2.5 kopeks an hour. Artificial flowers: two or three kopeks an hour. Ladies’ and gentlemen’s underwear: from two to six kopeks an hour. And so on, without end. Our workers’ associations and trade unions, too, ought to organise an “exhibition” of this kind. It will not yield the colossal profits brought in by the exhibitions, of the bourgeoisie. A display of proletarian women’s poverty and indigence will bring a different benefit: it will help wage-slaves, both men and women, to understand their condition, look back over their “life”, ponder the conditions for emancipation from this perpetual yoke of want, poverty, prostitution and every kind of outrage against the have-nots.

August 16, 2014

I've been wondering how and in what ways I might return more explicitly to feminist theory. It doesn't seem likely that I will be able to write explicitly any time soon. Return, though, is not quite the right word: it's not that I have not been writing as a feminist. It is that it has seemed to me that the only way to be a feminist is to be a communist.

By the mid-nineties, there didn't seem to be anything else to say in feminist theory. For the last couple of decades, I've asked my friends: what's the best book you've recently read in feminist theory. My own last favorites are Lynne Segal's Why Feminism?-- especially as it pulls together different lines of critique --and Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch for its alternative to "intersectional" analysis (which strikes me as the name of a theoretical failure more than an insight insofar as it takes as its presumption distinct lines or identities that have to be made to intersect rather than economic systems and ideological formations).

And yet while my back has been turned, real life, popular life, everyday life, has gotten increasingly worse for women and girls in the US with the Republican war on women, intensification of economic inequality, and pornofication of popular culture. Real practical political questions are intensifying, yet they don't seem theoretically all that interesting: is this a failure of theory or a kind of reversion, regression?

I am skeptical with the US government, armed agent of capitalism, tells us that it is trying to help girls and women. I don't believe there is good evidence for this. When the US government--whether executive, judicial, or legislative--starts expressing concern about rape, something else is at stake. But what?

Colleges and universities are battlegrounds. They are sites where the remnants of the middle class hold on to their position for dear life. Is this holding on becoming manifest in the legal apparatus being built in the name of educational equality for women? And even if this is the case, is skepticism and resistance the only response or might the apparatuses, policies, and procedures being put into place themselves be used or occupied for actually egalitarian ends?

August 14, 2014

It's become striking to me over the last few weeks how people seemingly committed to social change in fact hold on to privilege and inequality -- even if it is not their own.

This is not a new insight. Activists struggle over this question all the time. I've just come across it first hand in ways that I didn't expect. It seems like some people just like to protest. When the opportunity arises to do something with the capacity that protesting enabled, they fold, providing all sorts of excuses as to why the basic order should be maintained.

I didn't expect people committed to gender equality to defend the continuation of structures premised on inequality. Somehow I didn't expect that they, too, would enjoy hierarchical power. Maybe I can be clearer on this: I am not talking about people at the top of the food chain holding on to power. I am talking about people with relatively little power wanting to maintain the status quo that they in fact critique. It's as if they enjoy what power does to others; they enjoy seeing some people hurt or injured or shamed.

What I'm trying to describe (albeit necessarily vaguely) is not Nietzschean ressentiment. It's more like enjoying through the other. So, for example, people say they are against the exclusionary practices of group X, but when it comes down to changing the structures that let these practices persist, they balk. There are things that they admire about group X. They enjoy what the wealth and status of group X can accomplish, even when, especially when, it becomes violent and transgressive. Maybe a way to say this: class privilege sometimes persists because those who say they are against it are actually invested in it and enjoy inequality.

And the vehemence of the rhetoric and the anger that arises amidst the confusion is in part anxiety over the confrontation with enjoyment. They don't want to be people that, say, secretly tolerate an undercurrent of sexual violence--Zizek's obscene supplement or nightly law. This has to be repressed. Anger at authority is not anger over authority's failure to prevent violence. It's over authority's failure to prevent violence's exposure.

I think I have new appreciation for the power of the nightly law and how hard it is to address, how it can derail reformist as well as revolutionary energies. This may also go some way in accounting for the prevalence of 'awareness' as a left and liberal goal. By making us more aware of a variety of things, the left liberal leaves the obscene supplement in place. We get preoccupied with information and media campaigns instead of changing institutions and policies. It's one thing to be aware of inequality. Eliminating it is another thing altogether.

November 24, 2013

In the contemporary US, capitalist ideology pushes non-stop on the throttle of individuality.

"Individuality," in the present context, is not the same as rugged individualism or personality, although it shares with these earlier formations an emphasis on the singularity of a self against others. Unlike rugged individualism, contemporary individuality doesn't emphasize strength as much as it does suffering. Unlike personality (appearing in a new form in the 19th century and well-described by Richard Sennett), contemporary individuality doesn't rely on an interiority that is both authentic and to be cultivated, expressed only with care and attention. Instead, individuality is uniqueness for its own sake, uniqueness as moment, quip, fashion statement, flare, comeback, quirk--the difference that registers as different before it is swept into communicative capitalism's flows.

Two elements that factor into the particularly US fetish for individuality are law and economics. Our legal system emphasizes individual rights. The peculiarity of US libertarianism is its inability to acknowledge that a right is only as a good as the force that backs it up, whether that force comes from the state or the community. Rather than part of a broader cultural appreciation for the imbrication of rights and responsibilities, duties, and obligations (part of the continental tradition), in the popular understanding of rights in the US, rights are individual claims to freedom. Rights are imagined in terms of the specific injury of a plaintiff, not the larger, structural, condition of a collectivity. Winning rights (ending segregation, workplace discrimination, marriage restrictions) has required not just legislative victories but judicial ones as well, which means finding individual plaintiffs.

The US capitalist economic system likewise insists on individuality. Particularly in the wake of the attack on unions, work is more and more figured as an individual matter. It's a choice, an option, a matter of one's own unique ability to work hard, play the game, think outside the box, be a team player, demonstrate leadership skills, give a 110 percent, seize the opportunity, and take risks. One has to be be unique, different from all the rest, so that one stands out from the crowd, shows that one has what it takes -- no wonder it's hard for some people to think of themselves as part of the 99%. The demands of so-called flexible employment (flexible for whom?) make the process of differentiation constant and inescapable: one is perpetually trying to show that one is the best for whatever job comes around.

The best are hard to find. They are unique. This is the lesson of Wall Street, whose finance wizards are ostensibly rare and valuable enough to justify massive bonuses every year. It's the lesson of Silicon Valley: not everyone is Steve Jobs. It's the lesson of professional sports (one MVP), of Hollywood, of all of communicative capitalism's intensified networks as they activate the many in order to generate the one.

How, then, does the left respond?

There is the rejection of leaders. Already part of the legacy of '68, the current rejection of leaders rightly tries to immunize itself from celebrity seekers attempting to use radical politics for their own advancement. Some of the best versions of this have been the common names Zapatista (including Subcommandante Marcos) and Anonymous. They replace individual leaders with a common name and image. Occupy went far in this direction of a name in common as well.

Yet it's also the case that people sometimes interpret the need to provide an alternative to capitalist individuality as an injunction to destroy any individual who emerges out of the left as someone exciting, someone to hear and read. Need passes through demand to the plane of unconditionality, to put it in the ever-popular Lacanian idiom. In this urge to destroy, we find the intensity, the excess, of desire. It's desire that is absolute, unconditioned, out of proportion, desire that abolishes the dimension of the other.

We learn from Lacan that this desire is incommensurate to any specific object. So, we would be wrong to think of it in terms of its object. I admit, this is a drag. It would be much easier to be able to point out that someone desires their own fame, their own power, their own glory, and then demolish them by demonstrating how this desire makes them hypocrites, failed and false leftists, even betrayers of the people or the revolution. This sort of cheap shot relies on a shift into the economy of the drive, into the loop of momentary satisfaction where one repeats the same gestures over and over, getting off a little bit, enjoying, but completely effacing the dimension of desire.

To think within desire we have to think of it in terms of its effects, its abolition of the dimension of the other. The question, then, would be who is the other who is abolished? Who is the other for us?

For communists, the other is the capitalist other. In the demand to abolish private property (ownership and waged labor), basic needs pass "over to a state of being unconditioned, not because it is a question of something borrowed from a particular need, but of an absolute condition out of all proportion to the need for any object whatsoever, and in so far as this condition is perhaps called for precisely in this, that it abolishes here the dimension of the other, that it is a requirement in which the other does not have to reply yes or no." The capitalist cannot meet the demand. It cannot even reply "yes or no." Morphed through demands, basic needs are not enough. Their satisfaction is just a vehicle for a more profound, unconditional, restructuring of society.

An effect of communist desire, then, is the abolition of capitalist other, and hence an abolition of class itself, the very relation on which capitalism depends.

It's no wonder that capitalism works incessantly at blocking this dimension of desire, at attempting to push it into the more present and frequent momentary satisfactions of drive. Capitalism wants to channel this desire into different languages and images, the ones that it provides -- that of individuality, specificity, uniqueness. For a left that has struggled for a voice in a place contorted by forty years of unfettered capitalism, this channeling is apparent in efforts to suppress emerging class solidarity. Even as a global proletariat -- textile workers in Bangladesh, technology workers in China, transport workers of multiple backgrounds, indeed, a mobile proletariat visible less in terms of national location, race, or sex than of interdependence along multiple vectors -- presses to build its collective power, the left finds itself attached to practices that undermine solidarity. Perpetually suspicious and mistrustful, it eats its own.

There are multiple versions of this mistrust. Sometimes it manifests as a preoccupation with process. Sometimes it manifests as critique and "problematization" before anything has even been carried out. For those who engage in social media, the left-liberal press, and left academia, it appears as a set of predictable responses and snarky one-liners, which then devolve into debates over tone, and various accusations, most of which are mean-spirited, many of which demolish rather than build.

In the course of the demolition, the capitalist is displaced as the other. He is safe, protected, no longer the target.

The only way to move through this is via an ethos of comradeship, a solidarity. We can't fight class war one person at a time. We have to be connected, solidary, and strong. Mark Fisher's recent essay in The North Star is a major contribution to such an ethos as it describes the practices that have prevented it from emerging as well as their destructive effects. Mark writes:

We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. This doesn’t mean, of course, that we must always agree – on the contrary, we must create conditions where disagreement can take place without fear of exclusion and excommunication. We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital.

As I see it, examples of destructive projects are criticisms that attack someone for sins of omission, as if one person could do, think, and write everything, as if one person had the capacity of a party to encompass a wide array of positions. Criticisms of blog posts as if they were academic articles or even books are similarly misplaced as are attacks that proceed as if one article were all that a person had ever written.

What would the left mediapelago look like if we treated one another as comrades? Yes, there would be fights, splits, and purges. But they would grow out of and intensify opposition to capitalism. They would contribute to the maintenance of communist desire, not capitalist drive.

October 28, 2013

Jennifer M. Silva's Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (Oxford University Press, 2013) contributes to our understanding of the impact of forty years of neoliberalism on poor and working people in the US, the extreme perniciousness of the individual form, and the erosion of solidarity. Silva writes: "experiences of powerlessness, confusion, and betrayal within the labor market, institutions such as education and the government, and the family teach young working-class men and women that they are completely alone, responsible for their own fates and dependent on outside help at their peril. They are learning the hard way that being an adult means trusting no one by yourself."

Silva frames her book in terms of adulthood: what are the markers of adulthood for the post-industrial working class? This is an important question: since 2009, about half of people between the ages of 18-24 live with their parents. Ever-increasing numbers of working people are postponing or forgoing marriage. Ever-more are pushed into "flexibile" work-lives such that they move in and out of the paid work-force under conditions increasingly disadvantageous to labor. The markers of successful adulthood have thus changed since the 50s and 60s when adult life was characterized by a set of basic, achievable steps: finish high school, get a job, get married, get a house, have kids. Contemporary capitalism has pushed even these basic milestones out of the reach of most working-class people. So, how do they narrate their lives? Silva argues that they focus on themselves, telling a story of personal triumph over adversity. They position themselves as isolated and alone, betrayed and abandoned by all the institutions around them. Absorbing a narrative that integrates neoliberal individualism with therapeutic self-discovery and self-help ("no one can help me but me"), they make the self the primary locus of struggle and achievement. Failure is no one's fault but your own. Success is successful grappling with one's inner life, the trauma of neglect and abuse, and the ability to overcome that by working on oneself. The failure of others is thus their own fault. As one informant said, the biggest obstacle she faces is her own self.

The book comes from interviews with a hundred young working-class people in Massachusetts and Virginia from 2008-2010. Silva's analysis is attentive to race, gender, and sexual orientation, astutely observing "that without a broad, shared vision of economic justic, race, class, and gender have become sites of resentment and division rather than a coalition among the working class." Interview subjects ("informants") were men and women between 24 and 34. Most work in the service sector. About a third live with their parents or other older family member. Not quite half have high school degrees; a little over a quarter have some college. Most have significant debt. Most have trouble locating or keeping a job capable of sustaining them (paying rent, expenses, debt).

Silva outlines an emerging working-class adult self that has "low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health." They don't think about their lives in collective terms. They think about them in terms of recovery from painful personal pasts. Absent work as a source of self-respect and self-worth, they "remake dignity and meaning out of emotional self-management and willful psychic transformation."

The primary characteristics of the emerging working-class adult self are rugged individualism and distrust. People are reluctant to pour time, emotion, and energy into relationships that are risky. Although Silva emphasizes the impact on romantic relationships, we can extend this to a broader unwillingness to attach oneself to groups and causes. An inability to commit is an effect of economic insecurity that makes political organization as challenging and precarious as romantic association -- it's hard to know whether or not it's worth it; for many, past experience suggests that it won't be, that they most likely outcome is betrayal. Silva notes the foundational belief in self-reliance among African Americans in her study as they narrate their experiences in terms of their own individual experiences rather than in terms of the structural impact of racism. Solidarity, social trust, and community engagment plumment as the primary worldview conceives rights in terms of "'I's' rather than 'we's', with economic justice dropped out of their collective vocabulary."

Neoliberalism configures the working class self. Oprah, self-help books, therapy world -- these provide tools for people faced with pressures of flexibilization to cope with frequent change. Silva effectively illuminates the material conditions underlying contemporary culture's preoccupation with making and remaking one's individual identity. She writes, "The need to continuously recreate one's identity--whether after a failed attempt at college or an unanticipated divorce or a sudden career change--can be an anxiety-producing endeavor." Therapy offers a culture resource for ascribinging meaning to one's life in a world in flux. The individual self is both constant and maleable, a site for both continuity and change, made possible through a therapy culture that locates problems in individual pathology, inserts these pathologies into a specific individual past, and makes bearing witness to one's own suffering into a ground for a transformation confined to the self. "The sources of meaning and dignity--hard work, social solidarity, family--found in previous studies of the industrial working class had been nearly eclipsed by an all-encompassing culture of emotional self-management." The way working class people deal with upheaval, recession, and unemployment is by fostering flexibility within themselves, making themselves into adaptable beings detached from the outer world.

In a powerful and disturbing chapter on the hardening of working class individualism, Silva describes interview subjects' defense of big business and hostility toward affirmative action. The emotion underlying their neoliberal subjectivity is betrayal. These working class people feel the market to be impersonal, a matter of risk and chance. When government intervenes, it does so in ways that rig the game so that they can't compete. Furthermore, since so many have had to struggle on their own, by themselves, in contexts of poverty and diminishing opportunity, they take the fact of their survival as itself the morally significant fact: making it on one's own is what bestows dignity. Socialists like Obama thus take away their last best thing, the special something that is all they have left (this is my language), namely, the dignity they have precisely because they are completely self-reliant. Indeed, Silva's account suggests that solidarity is a problem because to embrace it would be to acknowledge one's insufficiency as an individual, one's inability to survive alone. Hence, working people are hostile to those below them on the food chain who need help from others because this hostility enables them to project neediness onto others thereby enabling themselves to shore up a fragile and impossible individuality.

Silva argues that young working-class people have learned that they can't rely on anyone. They try to numb their sense of betrayal by affirming the worst cultural scripts of individualism, personal responsibility, and self-reliance, hardening themselves to the world around them and thus becoming precisely the subjects neoliberalism needs insofar as they are hostile to various forms of government intervention, particularly affirmative action. It might be, then, that the sorts of critical exposes we on the left write and circulate, the stories of governmental corruption and the university failure, aren't helping our cause at all. Instead, they are affirming what the working class already knows to be true: they are being betrayed.

Silva's insight into the link between neoliberalism and individualism points to both the challenge for communist organizing and the possibility of a way forward:

autonomy should be understood a a by-product of an uncertain, competitive, and precarious labor market that forces individuals to navigate their life trajectories on their own in order to survive. That is, the more our futures seem uncertain and unknowable, and the more individualistic we are forced to become, the greater our need to find and express our authentic selves. Paradoxically, the more we are required to construct ourselves as individuals, to write our own biographies, the more we realize our utter inability to control the trajectories of our lives.

This 'utter inability' is a key locus of communist organizing. We have to realize together strength in numbers. And, we have to be able to be for each other not an audience for performances of authentic individuality but a solidary collective where meaning comes from common struggle. If people feel isolated, we have to build connections that prove they are not.

May 28, 2013

One way to discern an "idea whose time has come" is by the strength of the urge to evict it.

A new rejection of calls for a Party of the left suggests that, finally, a sense of the need for something like a Party is so undeniable that opponents feel like they have to confront it directly. Instead of coughing up old criticisms from late nineteenth century agrarian anarchists or early twentieth century Dutch councilists, those who attempt to divert the energies building toward greater organization are now having to look at our current situation. In related good news, the very weakness of "Party in the USA: the New Newest Left & the Organization of Sadness" signals the diminishing persuasiveness of those who want to prevent the left from coming together.

This kind of simple reversal, although adequate as a response to the post's wankery, only repeats the gesture animating the piece. What matters more than the author's indulgence is the position from which the author's critique is raised. What is at stake in ostensibly left positions that want to prevent the left from unifying?

Why would someone on the left want the left to be weak, to remain where it is, to refuse to learn from the Occupy experience and take the next step? What accounts for this left particularism and for its insistence that what we have now--fragmented groups that affiliate from time to time while focusing on their own particular issues and agendas--is the best way to end capitalism and build a more egalitarian world? Is it the narcissism of small differences? the fear of change? the assumption that capitalism is here to stay? a failure to grasp our present situation? Is it an individualist conception of freedom? A hopelessness with regard to the capacities of organized political subjects?

As it rejects the Party, the post depicts the 'new, new left' as sad. This is a mistake. What the author calls the "new new left" isn't sad -- it's energized, vital, fully aware of the urgency of the present. That's why meetings like Historical Materialism and Left Forum have been getting bigger every year, why there are more seminars, reading groups, actions, discussions, symposia, journals, and events, why Jacobin is making a mark.

I now take up some of the specific arguments offered against the Party.

1. "Left unification is not an unqualified good." Since these day everything is qualified--qualification being the quintessential gesture of the left--this point doesn't need to be made. So, what's at stake in stating the obvious? Opening the door to race and gender (has anyone else noticed that white male anarchists never talk about race and gender so much as when they are attacking communists, revolutionary socialists, and anyone else arguing for organizing the left?).

What's disingenuous about such appeals to race and gender is their obliteration of the history of the Communist Party in anti-racist struggle, the reality of Third World Communism (particularly in the seventies), and the fact that sexism and racism are not limited to the organized left but appear throughout society, including anarchist and insurrectionist settings. Perhaps the author is covertly urging a logic of separatism, of identity politics (the implication of the author's invocation of racism and sexism in Marxist groups being that criticism implies splitting rather than learning and change)? If so, then how far does it go? All the way to the individual (itself a false stopping point giving the imaginary character of identity). If not, then it is necessary to acknowledge that a left Party today, one with the capacities of the communist Party, wouldn't exist in the past but would incorporate and learn from the last sixty years of struggle and critique.

The author of the post, though, thinks that what we are doing now is the way we should continue to do things -- it's more flexible. It allows for more autonomy. But autonomy for whom and in what contexts? It seems to me that it's the autonomy of the ineffectual, one that continues to enable an economy that traps people in debt and furthers the intensification of inequality. The author, though, emphasizes "flexible forms of putting groups in contact" with no attention to what it might mean to create structures capable of enduring over time and space in the context of ever intensifying political struggle.

2. Left organizing should not "step back to (pre-)Fordist modalities of political organization in a post-Fordist capitalist landscape. Even MBAs know that flexible decentralization—for them in terms of labor processes, not in terms of the channeling of profit, of course—unleashes greater productive potentials than hierarchical forms of centralization, and I like thinking that my comrades have at least achieved the level of savvy of a Wharton undergrad." This lets us know the author's primary commitments -- to a vision of society in neoliberal economic terms. In this vision, the political is completely absorbed in the economic: both seem to benefit from the productive potential that comes from decentralization. Note as well the omission of the fact that there have been multiple models of the Party--not one "pre-Fordist" or Fordist model (a point which has to be occluded if the binary between bad centralization and good decentralization is to hold).

More horrifying, though, is the repetition of a primary myth of the new economy, that of flexibility and decentralization. If that were true, then why has there been consolidation in the finance sector, in communications, and in oil and gas? Doug Henwood demolished this myth in his After the New Economy. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, shows the connections between ideas of flexibility and military research (Rand Corporation, defense contracting, advanced research programs). And hubs are an immanent property of complex networks -- growth and preferential attachment result in powerlaw distributions, fundamental features of the winner-take-all and winner-take-most characteristic of communicative capitalism (Barabasi, Taleb). This doesn't even scratch the surface of the effects of so-called flexibility on workers and communities. Flexible for whom? Certainly not for laid off workers.

The post, though, announces "horizontalism does in fact produces a robust economy of organizations." It's already a bad call to render left political groups as an economy, as if groups were competing with each other rather than engaged in struggle against a common enemy. But can we say that there is robustness here? And in what sense? The fragmentation of the energies and efforts produced during Occupy has cost us a lot of time and good will. Attachment to horizontalism has been one of the problems. Without clarity of membership, infilitration is easy. Without clarity of vision, constant fighting over goals is unavoidable. Without a shared sense of how we are going to work together, what sorts of decision rules will let us determine which projects to pursue and when, we fall into patterns that reinforce prior privileges. It's not for nothing that Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" became so prominent during Occupy.

3. We don't need small groups of militants, leaders, an orientation, or a plan. I will ask again: who does this benefit? Who would want to seduce the left into thinking that we can have a politics without plans, a disoriented politics? Who would want to eliminate or undermine left militants and leaders? It makes me wonder about COINTELPRO and disinformation operations.

Planning is only a problem if one thinks that all potentials emerge in ways that leftists support. Since this is obviously false, planning ways to move forward (as well as ways to respond) is crucial. The most significant recent tragedy on the left is our failure to use the financial crisis of 2008 to our benefit. Occupy was a much needed (although a little late) response. The post asserts: "The last cycle of rebellion closed because we couldn’t keep up the intensity, because our feedback loop of positive affect was shattered by the State and by our own failures to stay committed to the democracy that we were making." Maybe we couldn't keep up our intensity because we lacked organizational structures that would distribute tasks such that we knew that someone would take responsibility for them. Too few people felt like they had to do everything (because some would drop the ball, fail to show up, volunteer but then not carry out what they had agreed to do). And maybe planning, having a clear orientation, would enable us not to be "shattered by the State." If we collapse whenever the State intervenes, we have and will have no movement. The one thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that the stronger we become the more repression we will encounter.

4. The turn to the Party is therapeutic, done in the "spirit of sadness." This doesn't ring true. In fact, it's so false as to invite diagnosis. Perhaps the sadness is over the failure of horizontalism. This would make sense. Many people are still grieving over the inability of horizontalism to last or scale. I think, though, that it has been an important experiment. We've learned from it. Indeed, as I argue in The Communist Horizon, this experiment should inform our thinking as we figure out the form of the Party that will work for us today.

The remainder of the blog post sets out what the author prefers to the Party. He advocates

a. "the production of new political sensoriums, new sensoriums of the political, so that we can ironize the ontological density of the state and capital and not feel like we’re living defective half-lives if we’re barred from access to either." Given that irony is a primary marketing tool and content of pop culture, it's hard for me to see exactly what it contributes to a new political sensorium. It also seems to me that trying to feel better about being barred from the state and capital is exactly what capitalism wants of those it's immiserating. Unhappy about your 80 thousand dollars of student loan debt? Try yoga, a 12 step program, Zoloft, or ironizing ontological density!

b. All of the social knowledges and powers we used to attribute to those terms are immanent to the social itself. We don’t need to organize, to treat ourselves or the social as a technical object. The terms to which the author is referring are "activists, militants, and Parties." I confess that at this point I wonder if the author is actually a Platypoid doing his best to kill the left. Dismissing the dedication of our activists, the courage of our militants, and the histories and organizational capacities of our parties, he evokes a social free from antagonism, inequality, oppression, and exploitation. How are knowledges and powers distributed? Who can access them and for what purpose?

c. Let’s disorganize. Who benefits from a disorganized left? A prominent paper last year documented the rise in inequality and decline of labor unions. There is no reason to think that the immanent movement of capital will do anything but enrich the few and immiserate the many.

April 23, 2013

I came across the following passage in a Slate piece about the failure of gun control legislation to pass the Senate. The question was whether it was Obama's fault, his failure to lead, or whether it was the fault of partisan politics.

In fact, the type of president who could work or cajole the Senate in this political environment would probably never have been elected in the first place.

The passage made me think about dilemmas on the left. The kind of left that we need for successful communist struggle today is the kind that can't appear. The conditions that make it necessary are the conditions that make it impossible.

If leaders emerge, they are slapped down. If they don't emerge we are stagnant. When some try to unify our struggles, they are treated with suspicion, resisted and rejected -- even as the multiplicity of singular struggles fail to make any substantial headway. The automatic reflex in the face of any appeals to unity is to criticize: there isn't a strong working class movement, so there is no ground for unity; any unity is or will be exclusionary; any success will only result in another form of domination.

It also seems as if people don't know how to follow. Instead, we are enjoined to have our own opinions, be independent, be winners. Among intellectuals this is a particular hazard -- especially for academics who are paid to judge, evaluate, and grade, who function in reputation economies that value criticism, pedantry, and iconoclasm, who construe disagreement as the sine qua non of independent thinking, especially when it is accompanied by an injunction to historicize and compare. It's odd, this way of thinking that considers itself so willing take risks even as it criticizes ideas and suggestions because they risk X, Y, or whatever.

The only ideas that seem to escape unscathed are those that conform to the expectations of communicative capitalism: do it yourself, rely on technology, go local (small is beautiful), smash and hack (as if nobody learned that the capitalist economy can eliminate trillions of dollars of wealth and still keep going).

I'm looking forward to Historical Materialism (and Left Forum) because it seems like we may be building the critical mass necessary to break free of this deadening individualism and figure out what pulling together will entail and how to go about it. I'm going to listen for organizing ideas (not because I am an organizer, I am not, but because I would like to be able to do my part in building support for them).

After talking to a friend who spent a lot of time with the Sandanistas, I started wondering about what it would look like to organize young women, single mothers in communist struggle. What would that look like? It seems a good place for unifying with teachers and nurses (who have been highly visible in their organized struggles). It would probably make health care, nutrition, education, and housing into core issues (and so look for protest opportunities on these fronts). And it could suggest the development of a communist infrastructure of clinics, farms, schools, and anti-eviction alliances/public housing/rent controlled apartments. A cool advantage here is that recognizing that women's politics are about a lot more than sex (birth control, abortion, etc) can attract and radicalize a lot of women who are considered so narrowly in mainstream Democratic politics.

September 14, 2012

A friend of mine dropped out of high school in the mid-70s. She went to work cleaning at a college in her town. She worked at this college for about 30 years.

Apparently, she didn't work for the college, though. She worked for three or four (it's hard to tell) different companies, companies contracted to do the cleaning.

Now she is ready to get her pension. She went to human resources at the college. But they said she didn't work for them. They sent her to the company currently responsible for housekeeping. That company sent her to the company that manages the union's pension fund.

The union told her to fill out a form. It seemed to her like they wanted her to say that she worked at the college for fourteen years. That's all they had on record. Apparently, some time (when?) the union's pension fund was in trouble so it merged into another pension fund. All the records from the early time were transferred to the new fund managers.

The new fund managers seem to be saying that they have records for my friend's years of work and that they don't have records for her years of work. They also seem to be saying that she needs to go to the social security office to get a bunch of detailed records of her hours. This will cost $47.50. It's hard to know why this is necessary if they already have records of her work. But maybe they don't.

Meanwhile, the office managing the fund changed addresses on August 1.

I can't quite get why they were telling my friend that she had to go get all these records. And this is after having spoken this morning to four people at three offices (college, current company, and union fund) two or three times each.

After two hours, though, something else emerged. It now seems like there was no pension fund until 1991. That is, it appears like the local only established a pension fund for the workers in 1991. And it also looks like the employer's contribution during that period was only five cents an hour. It's strange that no one mentioned this to my friend when she was first attempting to get her pension. It is also strange that it took so many phone calls to establish this. Is it even true? That's not what my friend remembers. She remembers a union being there from the beginning, but it's been a long time and this stuff is complicated and confusing.

On the surface, my friend's experience is that of working in the same place, in the same union, in the same buildings, for nearly 30 years. Below the surface: three (or four) companies, only one of which currently exists and two (or three) pension funds, only one of which currently exists.

Because of capital, her world is not what it seems. Her basic experience of work (which also sucks) is fundamentally different from capital's managing of her remuneration for her work. The effect is that she worked for 30 years and her pension will only cover 14 years. And, it isn't clear why: no union contract? a mismanaged pension fund? a loss of records as ownership changed? The complications benefit capital and screw her. She's being exploited through the mechanisms of a process that was supposed to provide her with a benefit. She doesn't understand a lot of it (and neither do I). But she gets the basic point: "they expect me to die so that they won't have to give me my money."

But this story is incomplete because I've left out or underplayed another key aspect of the situation--how the people who work in offices treat my friend. She's in her sixties, black, and without a high school degree. When she got to my house this morning, she understood the primary issue to be that she needed to get information from social security that would tell the pension fund people how long she had worked for the college (which, technically, was zero years since she was employed by a private contractor). Her concern was with filling out a form properly and needing some white-out to fix some information that was misrepresented. When I made the phone calls, people talked to me, answered my questions, tranferred me to others higher on the food chain, and began doing the research on the employers and union contracts. I'm a 50 year old white woman, a full professor with a Ph.D. I found it all extraordinarily difficult to understand and only began getting things sorted by asking a lot of questions. The bureaucrats only divulged information when asked and spoke as if all of their terms were clear and obvious. They were brusk and confident, off-putting if you aren't privileged enough or socialized to question and push back. After I hung up from the last call, my friend looked at my across the table, shaking her head in a combination of disgust, fury, and resignation, "they wouldn't tell me none of that."

As it looks right now, she will get $70.70 a month. She worked as a cleaner for thirty years.

Aphasia is a language disorder that results from damage to portions of the brain that are responsible for language. For most people, these are parts of the left side (hemisphere) of the brain. Aphasia usually occurs suddenly, often as the result of a stroke or head injury, but it may also develop slowly, as in the case of a brain tumor. The disorder impairs both the expression and understanding of language as well as reading and writing. Aphasia may co-occur with speech disorders such as dysarthria or apraxia of speech, which also result from brain damage.

What else do we learn from the inner tubes? About awareness and prevention. As if most of us are going to have the capacity immediately to diagnosis a stroke, access to the emergency vehicles and rooms, the hospitals, and the expertise necessary to implement our knowledge, not to mention the financial capacities to deal with the whole sticking mess (the much celebrated drugs for dealing with strokes caused by blockage are only indicated in about 6-10 percent of the cases; they have to be administered within the first couple of hours; and the medical data on their effectiveness is still inconclusive). As if we have the time for proper exercise (working how many jobs?), as if our food weren't poisoned. Awareness and prevention--these are the words capitalism uses to displace responsibility onto individuals as it eliminates the common institutions, practices, structures, and capacities through which such responsibility can be exercised. It doesn't count if all the food around us is already exposed to pesticides, chemicals, and radiation, if it's wrapped in carcenogic plastic. Do-it-yourself medicine, as if we were super spies suturing our own wounds with nylon thread. Awareness and prevention: these are the lies we tell and are told that make us feel like everything is our control, until we come face-to-face with the fact that it is not and never was and won't even come close until we act collectively.

September 30, 2011

I am in Amsterdam and seem to be alienating some folks. It could be that I am shrill and reactive because I haven't slept in 30 hours. Or maybe I have a point. Or both.

If I see video footage, a lot of clips shown for over an hour, and the footage is of the revolution, I want to know who is there and who is not. Why are there women in the first video but not in the other 10? Where were the women? Were they not out there throwing stones?

There could be good answers: no, they were not throwing stones; they were elsewhere. And then an explanation would follow. But if the question is dismissed as biased or unfair, then there is no chance for an answer. If the answer is 'these videos are a slice,' even as the slice is presented as representative, then the question is lost, diminished, and so is the opportunity to know where the women are.

Last year in London I saw an activist film, a kinda semi-fictional, semi-post-apocalyptic film that drew from footage of activists in the UK. The weird thing about the film: in the UK after the apocalypse, all the brown and black people are gone. Everyone is white. That is, the footage was of white people. What happened to everybody else? I think it's important to ask that question.

As I was muttering, a guy next to me (white, British), said that the videos we saw were like all revolutionary videos or videos of radical conflict--it's just men. I said that wasn't what I remembered--clips and images from '68, for example, have men and women. I mentioned Paris. He said, well, of course, they were communists.

Another reason, just in case someone needed one, to be communist: we already know that women and men are equal, fighting and struggling as part of the same collective.